I finished high school (with a community college class in my senior year) shortly before my sixteenth birthday and went to a local college on a full scholarship.  I spent five years in college (I hated school, but loved jstor), I graduated and got my dream job in 2009.

The path to doing it is different for everyone, and local factors (school system) will be critical.

Professionally, I recently had the pleasure of being assigned to a team with two others who had also started college at sixteen.  It was fun, and it felt nice to work with two other members of this weird club.  We compared notes and concluded that our experiences were a bit odd, though overall good, and that we are happy with where we ended up 

The 'but what about social stuff' concern is overblown, every teenager has to figure a lot out, and I don't think there was a world where I wasn't awkward, grade skipping or not.

A few years ago I saw that the longitudinal studies on grade skippers are out, kids who can skip generally reach 'average success in their chosen field' kids who could have, but do not, have a lower chance of finishing high school at all, and usually have worse outcomes on all measures, including social.  This matches my own story, and my experience with others.

If you can skip ahead, you should.  

We won't let our lack of data stop us from running our analysis program!

That $769 number might be more relevant than you expect for college undergrads participating in weird psychology research studies for $10 or $25 depending on the study.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03129-3 this is separate research.  It looks like this will happen, and it will come from somewhere other than the west.

Tech available in 2-5 years for 150k (or 50k in india?) sounds good to me.  I know someone who would 100% do that today if the offer were available.  I'm going to follow your blog for news, keep up the work, plenty of people would really like to see you succeed.

Imagine the dumbest person you've ever met.  Is the robot smarter and more capable?  If yes, then there's a strong case that it's human level.

I've met plenty of 'human level intelligences' that can't write, can't drive, and can't do basic math.

Arguably, I'm one of them!

Historically, everyone who had shoes had a pair of leather shoes, custom sized to their feet by a shoemaker.  These shoes could be repaired and the 'lasts' of their feet could be used to make another pair of perfectly fitting shoes.

Now shoes come in standard sizes, are usually made of plastic, and are rarely repairable.  Finding a pair of custom fitted shoes is a luxury good out of reach of most consumers.

Progress!

If you're interested in an engineering field, and worry about technological unemployment due to AI, just play with as many different chatbots as you can.  Ask engineering questions related to that field, get closer to 'engineer me a thing using this knowledge that can hurt a human', then wait for the 'trust and safety' staff to delete your conversation thread and overreact to censor the model from answering that type of question.

I've been doing this for fun with random technical fields.  I'm hoping my name is on lists and they're specifically watching my chats for stuff to ban.

Most 'safety' professions, mechanical engineering, mining, and related fields are safe, because AI systems will refuse to reason about whether an engineered system can hurt a human.

Same goes for agriculture, slaughterhouse design, etc.

I'm waiting for the inevitable AN explosion where the safety investigation finds 'we asked AI if making a pile of AN that big was an explosion hazard and it said something about refusing to help build bombs, so we figured it was fine'

States that have nuclear weapons are generally less able to successfully make compellent threats than states that do not.  Citation: https://uva.theopenscholar.com/todd-sechser/publications/militarized-compellent-threats-1918%E2%80%932001

The USA was the dominant industrial power in the post-war world, was this obvious and massive advantage 'extremely' enhanced by its' possession of nuclear weapons?  As a reminder, these weapons were not decisive (or even useful) in any of the wars the USA actually fought, the USA has been repeatedly and continuously challenged by non-nuclear regional powers.

Sure, AI might provide an extreme advantage, but I'm not clear on why nuclear weapons do.